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Warning: I bought a cheap coax stripper that cost me a whole morning
I was trying to save a few bucks last month and grabbed a no-name coax stripper from a discount tool site for like $12. It looked fine online, but the blade was dull right out of the box. I was on a job in a new apartment building, and it kept mashing the braid instead of cutting the jacket clean. I had to re-terminate the same line three times because the signal was junk, and each time I had to re-run the cable from the wall plate. That one cheap tool wasted about 3 hours of my time, which is way more than the $50 I would have spent on a good one. I ended up having to drive to the supply house at lunch to buy a proper Klein stripper anyway. Has anyone else had a tool fail so bad it wrecked your schedule for the day?
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dianam199d ago
Yeah, that "mashing the braid instead of cutting" thing is the worst. My buddy had a similar disaster with a bargain-bin crimper. The jaws were so loose they crushed every RJ45 connector he tried, leaving little metal shards inside. He had to re-do an entire office's network drops because the connections kept dropping. He was there until almost midnight fixing it.
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patricia329d agoMost Upvoted
Metal shards inside the connector? That's a new level of bad. How did the crimper even manage to crush them that completely? Your poor buddy, having to redo everything from scratch after a full day's work.
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